Reviews of Good Morning
Displaying all 3 reviews
Alex Flores
28Mar09
My introduction to Ozu Yasujiro movies was Tokyo Story which I really liked. Ohayo is my second movie and I it has made me want to see more from this director. In Ohayo you get to peek, once again, into the lives of ordinary Japanese families but this time in a comic setting. The humor is quirky and subtle and the story flows just beautifully. There’s the barely-show it -but there romance in the story whih I think it’s a more angaging way of drawing the viewer into the romantic sub-plot. What a wonderful little film! where the camera doesn’t move much (or so it appears) and somehow you feel you are co-existing with the characters. Minimalist but grand.
dope fiend willy
19Feb09
spoilers-many of my ‘reviews’ are reviews of what happens, rather than an indepth analysis. Some of these, I wrote for my own use, so that I can remember which Ozu film was which.
(1959) Good Morning
This is very light Ozu, in which the biggest conflict is between two children and there parents over whether or not they should have a television. Lots of fart jokes, a bit overdone in that area, if I must say. I watched this film a bit out of order, I was going in chronological order, but I had only a certain amount of time to slip a film in, and so I skipped about 6 movies on my list, and it definitely is stylisticly different than from the last films I watched…late Spring, Record of a Tenement Gentleman, and there was a father. There are no moving shots at all, and there are very few of Ozu’s non-story compositions. I’m used to being treated to shots of mountains and power lines, but this time nearly every shot has something to do with the narative.
Like I said, though this is very light Ozu, about a battle between two boys and their parents over whether or not they should have a tv set, and the boys win. These kids are really pretty bad, and they don’t even get in trouble for running away or stealing food and pots from a neighbor. The kids were really brats and get no comeupance at all, nor are they portrayed as the victorious villains that they are, in fact they are just given the awe-shucks treatment and that I could not take. One of my least favorite from Ozu.
- Currently 2.0/5 Stars.
Rodney Welch
11Jan09
Not Ozu’s best, but quite charming.
Kind of amusing to see that Ozu is said to have been an influence on Martin Scorsese. In Roger Ebert’s new book on Scorsese, the director discusses his differences with his screenwriter Paul Schrader, one being that Schrader was a huge fan of Ozu (and even wrote a book about him) while it took Scorsese forever to get into him. If there is anything in Scorsese’s work that brings Ozu to mind, I’m not sure it was the director’s intent, or that he was conscious of it.